‘Everything Else in the World’
by Stephen Dunn
W.W. Norton & Company, 2006
93 pages
 

Reading Stephen Dunn’s poems, you feel that he is fearlessly sharing his private thoughts with you, without artifice, telling you about his life and what passes through his mind during and after the day’s events, often confiding in you what he has not spoken aloud to others. But it is wise to remember that in one of his earlier poems (“Loves”), Dunn confesses: “I love that there’s a secret / behind every secret I’ve ever told /” and also “I’m withholding things of course, / secrets I’ll replay, alone, / when my bones get soft. /”

“Everything Else in the World” is Dunn’s 14th collection of poetry. He has received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Different Hours,” and has been a professor of creative writing for many years. Besides poetry, he has written a book of essays and a book of prose poems.

Dunn’s poems are not confessional in the sense of describing specific actions or events, but in revealing the pattern of his observations of people and nature—and subsequent introspection—especially his doubts, regrets, desires, wishes and fantasies.

Very often these revolve around the erotic as one of life’s mysteries and consolations. In the poem cited above, he writes: “so much eros in a normal room! / I love to use it / to make complexity joyous,” and “I love the way sorrow and lust / can be companions …” He is fascinated with the intimacies and distances between men and women. He frequently notes how intimacy itself eventually leads to concealment.

And there is marriage, whose difficulties and challenges Dunn has written much about. Speaking of someone’s adulterous affair, he writes: “Can you say you’re not envious, or that you’re sure / it wasn’t worth what he risked and lost?” But he hopes marriage and love can be enough: “Let love when it can / be a form of containment.” And he finds pleasure in the “day-to-day of marriage / and its important unimportances.” Part of him wishes for a more contented and quiet life, “for a reason to stay / in my house, to dare not, seek not, don’t.”

The narrator struggles with an emptiness that he “seems to need” and “that can’t be filled, / only alchemized …” There is a resulting restlessness, a desire for adventure and danger. He has “… felt the outlaw / in me stir, smiled that inward smile.” In an older poem, Dunn writes, “I love room enough not to be good.”

In the poem “My Ghost,” he writes about his relationship with his father—and the lasting effect of their shared secret: “… my father once held back / a truth that could have rescued him from sadness.” Now, Dunn says, “we’re restless together,” and this is part of his “inheritance.” It’s reminiscent of his memoir, “Walking Light,” in which Dunn speaks about his own deep connection to the experience of being silent, and also reveals the father’s secret (about how he gave away the family savings and withheld the truth from his wife, but not his son).

In the book’s title poem, Dunn describes how after college, where he studied history, he got a dull, well-paying job designing brochures. He eventually quit by sliding a note under his boss’s door, realizing that the deadness of the work “filled me with desire / for almost everything else in the world.”

Sports played an important role in his life—basketball was his stellar game when he was younger. Sports has value, Dunn writes, because “… within rules / freely accepted we came to recognize a heart / can be ferocious, a mind devious and fair.”

Other everyday things that give him pleasure enter into his poems: intimate conversations with strangers, gambling late at night in a casino, alone at home drinking single malt scotch and listening to music, “to quiet … whatever enormous animal night itself is.”

He can also be funny. In the present book, as he has before, he uses a student typo (“She pressed her lips to mind”) to stimulate a very witty poem.

Dunn writes some poems in a quieter, cooler tone. But to me they often seem flat, rather forced and unconnected to his strongest feelings and deepest concerns.

The secret of his most successful poems is the intimate voice of the narrator as he carefully observes and reflects on domestic relationships. He is keenly aware of the natural world and often finds metaphors there for human relationships.
Like other good modern poets, he makes it look deceptively simple. But for the reader there is also the shock of realizing that a serious person is struggling to speak about difficult issues of personal identity and morality while living in a world whose random violence and “…ugliness—/ the already brutal century,” are hard to ignore. He is willing to disturb you and not offer easy consolations.

Although it contains some wonderful poems (my favorites are “Infatuation,” “Emptiness,” “The Soul’s Agents,” “You’d Be Right,” “Process” and “My Ghost”), the present book is not one of his strongest. I would instead suggest his “New and Selected Poems, 1974–1994,” or “Landscape at the End of the Century.” And if you want a more personal glimpse into Dunn’s life and its relationship to his poetry, the memoir “Walking Light” is recommended.

Clearly, Stephen Dunn has written honestly and movingly about the confusion, ambiguity and losses as domestic life and personal relationships change. Now that he is past his mid-60s, it will be interesting to see if he is willing to write as sensitively and frankly about the fears, regrets and more permanent wounds of advancing age.